It’s a malaise of the system, not Malays

For the past 23 years in old town Petaling Jaya, Siti Rahayu, 63, can be seen early morning till late evening every day, rain or shine, pushing an old bicycle with an attached side-cart.

This wizened woman scours the rubbish bins of old town all day long for the voluminous, careless, care less discard of our voracious consumer society.

Thrice a day, she slowly wends her way home to two rented rooms in the Kawasan Melayu, her cart weighed down - a fridge, a rusted bicycle, a washing-machine precariously perched on a high stack of cardboard and paper - the sides of the cart festooned with plastic containers.

A couple of noons ago, Cik Siti was sitting on a high curb-stone, eating her lunch of rice and a salted egg.

Prompted by what Dr Mahathir Mohamad had said about Malays being lazy, I struck a conversation with her because she gave the lie to the good Doc’s assertion of the malaise of Malays.

At home she has an adult son who is content not to slave at a job, just get pocket-money and dinner from mum.

She said another son had asked her to live with him. “I’m used to working. Go there, just sit, watch TV – boring. Do nothing, the mind will go. As long as I can work…”

Asked for her response to Mahathir’s portrayal of her race, she said: "Cannot say race. It’s the individual. Every race got hardworking people, got lazy people. See who it is.”

Siti and her lay-about son illustrate that – both Malays, sharing similar genes, a polar-different response to life.

To substantiate his charge of Malay indolence, Mahathir recounted an occasion when he was PM, asking why his staff were leaving well before 4pm, and being told it was to avoid the jam.

Did he lay down the law after that? Or did it become one of the many inconvenient laws, rules and regulations that Malaysians ignore daily when there is lax enforcement which is (delete where inappropriate) often/regularly/rarely/when there is a financial settlement/during our many public holidays?

Clock-in system

Mahathir introduced the clock-in system, possibly in response to the skiving off early of civil servants.

The media organisation I worked for quickly adopted this wonderful tool that would monitor productivity, driving us to become like the workaholic Japanese the PM was promoting as model workers.

I spared the editorial floor that nonsense at the first meeting. My feature writers had weekly assignments, and in the mornings I wanted them in ministries, etc., digging stories, doing interviews. Clocking-in in the afternoon meant they worked less than eight hours?

During that period, I was seconded to go to Pahang and write a full-page advertorial for the Pahang SEDC (State Economic Development Corp) – one of those convoluted Umno company doing favour for Umno company thingamajig.

The CEO, MD, GM (I can’t remember the designation or name of the head pachyderm, just that he had the inevitable Datuk honorific) met my arrival at the lobby of the SEDC.

With pride, he told me that he had just introduced a clock-in system the day before. It was at the back of the building and even he, the big honcho, had to punch in.

At the back, he didn’t need to punch-in because the day before someone had punched in the punch-in clock.

I should have been an outraged citizen at this wanton vandalising of public property less than a day old, but it was the anarchic streak in me that had to suppress a chuckle – good old indomitable Malaysian spirit quickly improvising a solution to a problem.

Then up one flight of backstairs to walk into the industrious main office – to see a couple of women knitting, doing crochet, a few women gathered round one showing swatches of kain songket, a few guys in a corner, yarning and smoking.

Pregnant silence, followed by a quick running to desks to simulate work while waiting for an explosion that never came because I was quickly ushered out, this time to take the lift straight to the big man’s office to be shown, among other things, hallucinatory horrors!, a large 3-D model of his grand vision – a cable-car swinging above the jungle canopy to a 5-star resort and 9-hole golf course in the heart of Taman Negara, on the ground a couple of dirt-bike trails.

What was he smoking? He sold me a vision of tourists snapping the wildlife.

Yup, instead of the animals getting far away from the noisy tourists and dirt-bikes, the animals going: Yo geng, 9 o’clock, time to work, give tourists National Geographic moments.

Thank God, this dream evaporated.

The above story suggests Dr Mahathir is right.

Offending fishing trawlers

But then I think of the two weather-beaten, life-worn fishermen in a remote Kelantan fishing-village I spent much of a hot afternoon with last Ramadan.

A lifetime out at sea, and now with a small, shallow-draft boat and an outboard motor they consider it good fortune if they take home RM800-1,000 a month, leaving aside a fallow period of three-month while fish spawned, periods of rough seas, depleted stocks and trawlers sweeping in-shore.

Photographs of offending Malaysian trawlers submitted to the authorities got the reply – they belong to Datuk.

They knew the system. Poor fishermen against a Datuk? No case.

So not all Malays are malas (lazy). There are lots of them working hard every day trying to stay ahead of rising prices, lots of them who are supposed to be BRIMful with joy at the occasional dribble of a few hundred ringgit, lots of them who are at the bottom of the bumiputera food-chain.

All those many Malays who have waited six decades for the government, national and state, to deliver on part of their promises, all those many Malays whose numbers and poverty justify the continuation of “affirmative no-action.”

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.- Mkini